Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Here's Something

I haven't posted much lately because I have been working on a short secret project

watch for it soon

assistant animation by Tommy and Jojo

Slick camera moves by Alex

Story by Tom Minton and me

Design and animation by me

Furry voices by Steve and Auralynn

*Explanation of techniques:

Adult Swim asked me to do a few short shorts in completely different styles using different characters.

So I thought maybe I would experiment and try out some styles and techniques I like about some of my favorite old cartoons. In some of them I mixed and matched ideas from 2 styles and then did my own take. Like, there's one where I combined some rubber hose style movement with Anime expressions. Or I did some UPA style designs but did wackier animation.

In this Furries short I wanted to see how to do wall to wall dialogue like how most modern cartoons in primetime are done. The only wall to wall dialogue cartoons that ever really inspired me though were Fred Crippen's Roger Ramjet. I always liked the funny cutting and quick camera moves and wanted to try something like that myself.

Hence the fast cuts and silly camera moves in this. I also like early limited animation where parts of the character are held and other parts move. Only they usually try to hide that contrast by making the movement very slight or non descript. I thought I would instead do the opposite. I made what moved be goofy to contrast against the frozen parts.

Soon you will see a much more fully animated short short I did for someone else.

I keep wondering when Adult Swim will go with a JK feature? They did an Aqua Teen Hunger Force feature years ago, though its $750,000 budget might prove problematic for a JK feature. Then again, software's come a long way in reducing costs and impoving creativity since "ATFC-Colon".

That is amazing and hilarious, and definitely what furries are like! :P! Short secret project, eh?! I can't wait for that! I love your cartoons/Spumco cartoons! I, myself am an aspiring cartoonist, and yes I am using the Preston Blair techniques, I have the book!

I also love how you did the Adult Swim text at the end, very neatly done! =) -Zac L.S

Nice! The male furry's expression when he exclaims "fuzzy stars!" reminds me of the fire chief back from Ren & Stimpy. I love the painting at the end of this segment as well.

Random thought- looking back at the wonderful cartoon versions of Tenacious D you did for the "Fuck Her Gently" video, I began wondering what a John K take on Conan O'Brien and Andy Richter would look like... do it!

i love everything in it that is hand animated, and cringe at all the cpu animated stuff (camera)... thanks so much for sharing that with us, but just to give an opinion, i'd prefer a simpler design or shorter length with more animation per second.. maybe they could have had masks on for some of the time to save on animation if it needed to be that length? sorry to give you crap, i'm sure you're doing your best with budget limitations.. dang i wish you had the budget of a disney animated film and could put guys like glen keane to work!

Eh, it was meandering and not very appealing. Where are the principles, John K? Where is the interesting posing and framing we saw in your early work? I am disappointed. You've fallen for the same trap as the people you rail against. :\

Hello, I am new to posting but I been reading this blog for almost a now. This is some great stuff, I mean where do I begin. After watching the ren and stimpy dvds, I knew I had found someone who can make me into a great cartoonist. This blog can polish my rough edges and make me shine like a brand new punch-buggy.

I am glad I came to this blog to learn how to be a real cartoonist. It may take me ten years to master cartooning, it may take me a life to be cartoonist. Someday, I might be among the greats like you. Until then, I will have to practice, practice, practice, practice, etc.

It looks like Adult Swim knew what to ask for - you can cram a lot of funny into short bumpers, and you are fluent with many different styles/ages of cartoons! I wonder what you would do with a Disney-ish styled short? Maybe something like "Stimpy's First Fart".

Darn! The video isn't working for me, and taking a really long time to load and play, and when it does, it suddenly keeps stopping, but the designs look fantastic! Excellent job, John. I haven't been posting much, and apologize for it, since I've been busy trying to do really well this senior year so I can go to art school by the fall of 2012. Really hard classes that I wish I hadn't taken, but oh well...

I liked most of the cuts. I understand that some parts are going to be quick as the time is short, and I was amused by the awkward cuts to the tails and other areas. I believe the dialogue was having a little trouble, though. Again, short commercial, need to give it a punch, so it'll be effective as is. Certainly entertaining.

A really nice piece. Though I do have my bugaboos about one or two things. (As if you need or deserve my comments!)

I, for one, love the camera moves, but they don't always work. The final positions stop dead center on the parts you want to highlight. But compositionally, they'd be better off slightly off center.

The Flash animation is fine with one or two very small exceptions. The face moving down the body might have had a little more trouble than it does - like not going directly there. It feels like limited animation there, unlike much of the rest of your work.

The piece was daring and funny. You've got to be congratulated for doing something different for the boring Adult Swim.

But we did have trouble controlling some of the camera moves. The camera tools are sort of awkward and indirect in Harmony and I'm trying to get them to work more like traditional cel animation scene planning.

They never make computer operations as simple and direct as traditional tools.

The face going down the body is supposed to be traveling down on an "s" curve following the shape of the body. That was a bugger to try to make work, but it's stupid on purpose.

If the final position are perfectly centered then I'm outraged. I'll have to go back and check that out, then fire myself.

I'm still getting used to doing animated projects with much less people.(and less money)

In the old days there was a specialist for every operation-a camera expert, an army of sound technicians, animators, a breakdown artists, assistants, colorists. That was a great thing in the 1940s, in the 1980s it was not a great thing.

Now with all the new technology you make things with 4 people instead of 50 and we all have to learn things we never did before.

That has its good points and bad points.

But I like the more control you get as a director.

It just takes time to master some illogical software tools.

But we're working on it.

I feel like it's the 1930s again, only we need to produce more cartoons more often so each one can get better than the last as we learn new things.

What's great about this as well is the idea that 4 or 5 people can sit in a garage on the weekends for a year or two and have a picture at the end of the year with pretty decent results. Kind of like that fantastic youtube clip of Ralph Bakshi ripping the animation world a new one. Lets hope people take some clues and start producing themselves.

I just got back from a comic con recently so I guess the subject matter hits me on a more personal level now than it would have last week.That was certainly fun. I guess that's what's true about even your worst stuff, John, nobody can say that they're not fun to watch. Anyone who doesn't find them fun, has issues.

I really don't think shoving everyone with a dissenting opinion into the category of "trolls" is clever or in anyway necessary, even; John is a big boy, he can take cricticism.

On this case, while the idea was good and the risk of experimenting must always be appreciated, sometimes the camera angles went TOO wild and the script really isn't much strong.

However, it is still a good experiment and I hope John keeps experimenting- I'm particularly curious of what he refers to as "there's one where I combined some rubber hose style movement with Anime expressions."

and it's totaly understandable why the camera movements are not perfect.I make animations by my self and with the animation software's today it's quite possible to do it on your own. But like you i am not an expert at every department of animation. It is something you learn allong the way, but they realy should make these programs more animator friendly becouse you just don't want to be programming and animating at the same time.

John K, what do you think about "serious" films like Seventh Seal and La Dolce Vita?

Also, very excited to hear when the Censored 11 is released, especially Coal Black. I want my first viewing of it to be on a pristine screen, not on YouTube. Are all the artists you talk with excited about it too?

Also, I love the facial motions in the cartoon. Sad when a cartoon made cheaply has better skills that major motion pictures.

I was wondering when you were gong to post more animation shorts. This is crazy, man! Hey John, if you can mind looking at some of my Preston Blair construction studies. I believe I'm making some progress:

Haha, a friend of mine was just at the biggest Furry Conference here in Europe a few weeks ago.. The pictures she took there were hilarious. John, your animation is almost as funny as the real thing! Loved when the raccoon stated his name in binomial nomenclature :P

The staging seems to be unusually flat for what you normally do - the background might as well be a matte painting. I'm not sure if that's a side effect of using Harmony, but I've seen you do more dynamic work in the past. Is this a stylistic choice? I'm a bit unclear.

I understand that the characters themselves are a kind of experiment in limited animation, so I've got nothing to say there.

I read one of your comments, where you say that it feels like the 30's again. Back in the 30's, the Fletchers were doing some of the early revolutionary work on animation, and lately I've been thinking that the move to computers set things back briefly, because it's given artists a new toolkit that they have to use, but might not be as familiar to them. This would be in part because programmers aren't artists and might not understand what kind of tools cartoonists and animators need. You've commented in the past that it took some work to adapt to a tablet. What are your thoughts about the evolution of the tools available to computer-based animators?